1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a method, apparatus and computer program product for blocking and filtering incoming e-mails at the enterprise level. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a computer implemented method, apparatus and computer program product for blocking and filtering incoming e-mails at the enterprise level based on input from individual clients.
2. Description of the Related Art
The expanding use of computers and the internet around the world has resulted in an explosion in the amount of e-mail that is received by businesses and individuals. This increase in e-mail has proved a ready marketing medium for advertisements. Once a commercial advertiser is in possession of an address, an advertiser can begin sending electronic advertisements to that address. Further, known and valid e-mail addresses are often shared among advertisers, so that once an address is known by one advertiser, other advertisers are often able to obtain the e-mail address as well. This can result in businesses and individuals receiving quite a bit of unsolicited e-mail, or spam, from unknown marketers. The huge volume of spam that assaults an e-mail address can have taxing results on the network resources of a business, as well as eroding the productivity of employees. Spam can be deleted individually by the recipient, however this does nothing to prevent the loss of productivity and system resources.
Networks often maintain a database of addresses of known senders of spam, which can be automatically discarded upon receipt by the network before the spam is delivered to an individual account. However, this global blocking assumes that no account in the system would be interested in viewing the mail. Still other methods use keyword filters. Incoming e-mails are scanned for the inclusion of some pre-determined keywords, and if detected, the message may be discarded.
Each of the global methods described above presume that each individual account has no interest or legitimate reason to receive the spam. For example, an e-mail related to hotel accommodations might be stereotyped as spam, and deleted, even though personnel routinely making trips for the business might benefit from receiving such an e-mail.
Despite the methods described above, there remains no way of personalizing an e-mail filtering or blocking system so that user input is taken into account when determining the blocked and filtered domains.